Early Caribbean Digital Archive: Recovery and Remix

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (http://omekasites.neu.edu/ECDA), now under construction at Northeastern University, has two primary related goals: the first is to collect and make accessible a broad and deep literary history of the Caribbean written by both white colonials and black, enslaved, creole, and/or colonized people. There is currently a gap in the archives (particularly digital archives) devoted solely to pre-19th century Caribbean writing and this gap is itself a by-product of the history of European imperialism in the Caribbean. With a few exceptions, the history of the colonizer is the story that scholars have found in pre 19th-century Caribbean texts. The ECDA archive, however, uses the affordances of the digital archive and TEI mark-up to foreground previously buried and “embedded” histories, narratives, and cultural practices of diasporic Africans and Afro-creole enslaved peoples in the Caribbean, thereby creating a new body of (reassembled) texts and knowledge. Thus in addition to recovering and aggregating sources from the early Caribbean, the ECDA seeks to enable scholarly “remix” in order to achieve a second goal—that of reframing the literary history of the early Caribbean as one in which voices that have been buried within the imperial history of the Caribbean emerge in new forms and by way of new textual analytics. In this paper, we plan to explore methods of engaging in recovery and remix, and the challenges and stakes of doing so.